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THE GREAT RETREAT TO VICTORY

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Enlai and other leaders of the First Front Army ended their epic Long March. To commemorate the occasion, Harrison E. Salisbury, the distinguished former New York Times foreign correspondent, obtained unprecedented permission last year from the People's Liberation Army to retrace many portions of Mao's Long March. He interviewed many of the participants, mainly but not exclusively survivors of the First Front Army. The result is a lively narrative largely from the vantage of Long March military commanders and commissars at the division, regiment and brigade levels - soldiers who, after 1949, became China's generals, ministers and top provincial officials. His story will in most respects please his informants. In October 1935, Mao and his associates entered the haven of an existing Communist base in Gansu and Shaanxi Provinces in remote northwest China. Driven from their Jiangxi base in the southeast by Chiang Kai-shek's successful military offensive, the surviving band numbered roughly 4,000 soldiers, many of whom had joined the Red Army along its tortuous 6,000-mile trek. Roughly 86,000 soldiers had begun the retreat in October 1934. Many of them deserted and tens of thousands died. No one really knows the precise toll. In the subsequent months, other exhausted survivors completed their own long marches. These people were principally from the Second and Fourth Front Armies, which had left their bases in southern China in 1934-35, and by 1936 were ordered to Mao's lair. Fortunately, these troops assembled in the right place at the right time. The stage was set, following the Japanese invasion of China, for the rapid expansion of Communist strength across north China from 1936 to the early 1940's and ultimately for the military capture of China by the Red Army.

Another quiet struggle soon erupted, which has persisted to the present day - the battle among strong-willed men and women for their place in history. Who would be blamed for the Red Army's failure in Jiangxi? Who would seize the credit for escaping Chiang's net? Who would suppress inquiry into the inevitable tactical blunders the Red Army committed along the march? What Communist leaders would successfully claim that the route of the Long March was their idea?

The stakes in the struggle grew as the Communists' strength increased. The Long March deservedly captured the imagination of the Chinese people and of the world. This was an incredible story of heroism, dedication and will. A leader who could envision the opportunities to be obtained from such sacrifice and who could inspire such loyalty possibly could rally the prostrate Chinese nation. He deserved perhaps to be China's leader. The story of the Long March became totally enmeshed in issues of authority and legitimacy both within the Chinese Communist Party (C.C.P.) and in the country as a whole.

Not surprisingly, Chiang Kai-shek was the first to try to master the story - by suppressing it and by treating it as a crushing defeat for the Communists. The next person to seize the historiographical initiative was Mao Zedong. In 1936, he told the American journalist Edgar Snow about the march, modestly downplaying his own role but subtly equating his story with that of the Communist Party. With the publication of Snow's book ''Red Star Over China'' in 1938, Mao controlled the story, and until his death Mao's claim to rule in part stemmed from the wisdom and valor he and his admirers increasingly claimed he had exhibited on the march. Mao's purges of his erstwhile Long March colleagues required continual revisions of the myth, rubbing out the contributions of disgraced officials.

To be sure, knowledgeable Kuomintang scholars on Taiwan, assisted by turncoat Communist Party Long March participants, had punctured the Maoist myth. In addition, Zhang Guotao, a founder of the C.C.P., leader of the Fourth Front Army and a rival of Mao's, ended up in Hong Kong in the 40's and later detailed his version of the march. However, the definitive documents and memories were locked on the mainland, and Mao had thrown away the key. Mao's death in 1976, the restoration to honor of many participants of the Long March and the realization that many of them, now in their 70's and 80's, will soon die have contributed to an outpouring of new materials in Chinese on the Long March. Several key events have received considerable scrutiny, such as the pivotal Zunyi meeting of January 1935, during which blame for the Jiangxi failures was pinned on Moscow-dominated C.C.P. leaders. At Zunyi, major leadership changes greatly expanded Mao's power - but not as extensively as Mao and his hagiographers wished us to believe toward the end of his life.

Mr. Salisbury's narrative is an engrossing and revealing account: the 1985 version of the march is certainly the best to date, based primarily on his interviews of participants and mainland Chinese historians. Purists will carp in academic journals about an uneven pursuit of several key issues. For example, Mr. Salisbury painstakingly traces the 1934 decision to launch the march, but does not illuminate the precise roles of Zhou Enlai, the Red Army commander Zhu De, and the party general secretary, Zhang Wentian (alias Luo Fu), after the Zunyi meeting. All three emerged from Zunyi with important responsibilities, seemingly equal to those of Mao, but Mao is the only person to whom Mr. Salisbury attributes decisions during the subsequent campaigns through Guizhou, Yunnan and Sichuan. The author recounts the dispute between Zhang Guotao and Mao in the summer of 1935 over the ultimate destination of the march, after Zhang's large Fourth Front Army had joined with the exhausted and smaller First Front Army. The two also differed over who should command the Red Army forces. Still, Mr. Salisbury has not satisfactorily solved the riddle of why some of Mao's closest associates (especially Zhu De) left with Zhang Guotao on his westward march, nor why Mao suddenly bolted northward to Gansu.

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Out of the detail Mr. Salisbury provides - and his descriptions of specific, frequently little-known battles are superb - comes a clearer understanding of the Long March. The First Front Army was enveloped by hostile forces throughout the march; it maneuvered within a moving encirclement. Its movement inevitably was directed toward the weakest portion of the perimeter. The army controlled the direction of its march to the extent that its feints drew enemy forces away from the area toward which the Communists wished to go. Communist survival arose from excellent intelligence (the Red Army deciphered encrypted messages from Chiang Kai-shek to his troops), deception, rapid movement and luck. The Long March was not, therefore, an exercise in long-term planning. Only weeks before Mao and his associates entered Gansu did they decide upon their destination. The march involved improvisation, flexibility, daring and loose coordination among dedicated squads scattered over the countryside.

These were the leadership principles Mao also sought to apply to the economic development of China in the 50's.

Nor was the Long March an exercise in benevolent military behavior. Mr. Salisbury makes clear that the Red Army robbed its way across China. Perhaps the cause was noble, but nonetheless the army lived off the land, generating hostility especially among the minority tribes whose coffers it confiscated and whose grain it consumed. True, the Communists did not rob the poor -but the poor had nothing to offer.

Mr. Salisbury discloses that to win the hearts and minds of the drug-addicted poor, the Red Army distributed opium, which it had also looted.

The contemporary significance of this book is its attempt to stabilize Mao's reputation. It has suffered in China in recent years, and ''The Long March'' - which surely will be translated and have wide distribution there - may represent an effort by Mr. Salisbury's army hosts to halt that trend. Only rarely, apparently, did they encourage the author to doubt Mao's sagacity on the march. Only briefly does Mr. Salisbury delicately question Mao's selection of sites for crossing the Golden Sands River and the Snowy Mountains. Without obtaining hard evidence, Mr. Salisbury basically accepts their account that Mao ran the show after Zunyi, this in spite of efforts by some historians in today's China to portray decision making as collegial. Western observers of China have argued that many of Mao's military lieutenants remain loyal to the memory of the Chairman as their Long March commander and dislike the denigration of his contributions. Thus Mao emerges relatively untarnished in this account, the only really astute strategist among the Communist leaders during this critical period.

However, one still must ask: When did Mao become the pre-eminent leader of the movement? When did collective leadership yield to one-man rule? My own hunch is that Mao, without power at the start of the march, gradually increased his power only during and after it. He did not become the Chairman of the Military Affairs Commission until July 1937, and he did not consolidate his position in the party until the early 40's. The contributions of other party leaders and commanders in the field probably remain understated in current historiography and in this account. Ascertaining Mao's true role in the march - if it can ever be discovered - awaits opening of the archives and the careful sifting of still unpublished key memoirs. The struggle for the history of the Long March has not yet ended.

Michel Oksenberg, an associate of the Center for Chinese Studies at the University of Michigan, retraced portions of the Long March route in 1981. He was a member of the National Security Council staff from 1977 to 1980.

A version of this review appears in print on September 29, 1985, on Page 7007007 of the National edition with the headline: THE GREAT RETREAT TO VICTORY. Today's Paper|Subscribe